Reprogramming Crochet Classes: From Remote to IRL

Q: What’s wrong with the world?
A: We are buried beneath the weight of information, which is being confused with knowledge; quantity is being confused with abundance and wealth with happiness. Tom Waits Interviews Tom Waits: 2008

If we didn’t already know it the pandemic taught us that we have the technology to function as humans without ever leaving the comfort and safety of our own homes. We no longer have to risk being sneezed on at the supermarket checkout and we can learn new skills without the awkward social interactions of going to college.

We can attend a virtual networking event with hundreds of professionals in our pyjama bottoms and fluffy bunny slippers. We can learn to sing, learn to meditate, play in a band, exercise, talk to a doctor, talk to a stranger and fall in love remotely – thus avoiding any interactions with other people, spaces or things outside of our own physical reach.

Because so many things can be achieved independently through the interface of our digital devices, and as online advertising and clever marketing remind us constantly how easy our lives can be, it’s convenient to make ‘remote’ our default setting.

But when everything in our life is effortless does everything also become meaningless? Isn’t it the frissons, the friction and the potentially abrasive interactions with people, places and things that bring excitement, meaning and serendipity into our lives?

Real life encounters with people who view the world differently to us teach us to be openminded – or at the very least tolerant. There’s no mute button or off switch in real life and we can’t pick our conversational questions from a drop-down menu or our answers from ChatGPT. We need to actually use our brains.

In his book The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way we Think, Read and Remember. Nicholas Carr discusses the profound ways that the internet and digital technologies are rewiring our brains.

When we’re online we’re constantly multitasking and shifting our attention between short pieces of text and hyperlinks. The mental agility required to skip between tasks and information is remarkable, but at the same time we’re losing our ability to reason creatively and think deeply.

Online we can collect easy to digest bite sized bits of information; just enough info to answer our question, and if we don’t like the answer we can search for a different one that’s more in keeping with our own perception of the world.

However extreme or banal our world views if we trawl the shallows of the internet for long enough we’ll find some evidence to justify them.

Even though we know mass media plays a sinister role in our perception of the world and the way we think – like marionettes we allow digital technologies to yank our strings and direct our attentions everywhere and nowhere. We’re losing the ability to read and understand ideas and concepts if they’re written in more that 280 characters.

Scanning text to extract the most obvious points in the least amount of time (and skimming over the nuanced subtexts) used to be a skill reserved for last minute exam revision but now it’s how most of us read everything. And because we want to do it ever faster the internet is full of articles on how to speed up your reading time. Enter: Bionic Reading

 Bionic reading is a way of formatting text with bold letters allowing the eye to glide easily and quickly over it optimising speed.

Q. So what’s the problem with that? Isn’t it better to read more and faster?

A. Not really. Deep reading is better than more reading

Deep reading allows ideas to penetrate – to help us go beyond knowing and into understanding. Scanning or skimming text provides us with information but deep reading teaches us to understand and empathise.

“Reading is a technology for perspective – taking. When someone else’s thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person’s vantage point” Steven Pinker (Professor of Psychology, Harvard University) The Better Angels of Our Nature. 2011

When we read deeply we give ourselves time to consider different perspectives and we’re more likely to play with ideas in our head and draw our own conclusions.

But we all know this. And we knew this was coming – we just chose not to think about it.

In the 1970 book Future Shock Alvin Toffler and Adelaide Farrell predicted the dangers of information overload and how it scrambles our decision making processes. Simply knowing more stuff doesn’t help us formulate authentic and objective ideas it simply distracts us, confuses us and increases the production of the stress hormone cortisol.

A decade later in The Third Wave Toffler and Farrell talk of an ‘info-sphere’ which describes our future virtual lives and pretty much everything we now take for granted. They also foresaw a population plagued by social anxiety and paralysed by convenience.

“For a shy person or an invalid, [sic] unable to leave the home or fearful about meeting people face to face, the emerging info-sphere will make possible interactive electronic contact with others who share similar interests — chess players, stamp collectors, poetry lovers, or sports fans — dialled up instantly from anywhere in the country.”   Toffler & Farrell. The Third Wave 1980

By the early 1990’s we were addicted to and numbed by multi-channel TV and this over consumption inspired The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy’s iconic track Television, the Drug of The Nation:

“It’s the perpetuation of the two party system

Where image takes precedence over wisdom

Where sound bite politics are served to

The fast food culture

Where straight teeth in your mouth

Are more important than the words

That come out of it.” Michael Franti. Television the Drug of the Nation. 1991

Junked up on trash TV we were unaware that an even more dangerous Hydra was incubating in the form of the World Wide Web and we didn’t know that the computers we were programming would eventually reprogram us.

The internet is training our brains to be like butterflies, never staying anywhere for long enough to really understand it and allowing the algorithms to choreograph our flights.

“By moving from the depths of thought to the shallows of distraction, the web, it seems, is actually fostering ignorance” Nicholas Carr.

As humans we’re habitual creatures and we’ve probably all developed our own online habits; visiting the same websites at a particular time of day and scrolling through the same social media accounts. Even our ‘go-to’ news channels are comfortingly familiar as they stream their incomprehensibly barbaric content.

How often do we choose to view ‘the news’ from a different channel with different voices and a different perspective?

The internet contains every possible view point you can imagine, and even more that you wouldn’t want to. It contains the history of everything and we’ve gorged ourselves on so much information we’ve lost our appetite for deeper understanding preferring to stick to an information finger buffet and a reduced fat diet of knowledge.

For the Boomers, Gen X ers and Millenials managing infinite quantities of information is challenging, but it’s not just how we process information that’s changing.  For Gen Z and the rising Generation Alpha the whole of reality has been inverted and the world has turned upside down in a grotesque, carnivalesque, masquerade. Offline simply plays a supporting role to hyper-real online experiences.

In the words of the actor/comedian/musician/film maker and YouTuber Bo Burnham:

 “ The outside world, the non-digital world, is merely a theatrical space in which one stages and records content for the much more real, much more vital digital space….One should only engage with the outside world as one engages with a coal mine…Suit up, gather what is needed, and return to the surface.”

So, however we feel about the internet, AI, augmented realities, social media, chat rooms and chat bots, Alexa and Siri are not leaving the party and whilst they may be chipping away at our intelligence and autonomy we’ve seen they can also bring huge benefits to our lives.

Online experiences can be liberating and rewarding. They can be a life line, as we learnt in lockdown, and I’m personally grateful to these technologies for helping me reach a wider global audience.

But it’s the real, sometimes messy or uncomfortable interactions we have with other people, other spaces and other things that can bring deeper and more meaningful experiences into our lives. Online we can switch off, swipe right, click away or scroll down without offending anyone or having to explain ourselves – but IRL these rules don’t apply.

It can be difficult navigating your way through (real) life with (real) people and (real) things – but that’s the whole point. By changing one small thing; the location, the materials you interact with or the people you mix with you’re inviting new things into your life.

When life starts to feel a little two dimensional and a little too convenient, or if you’re beginning to sense that there’s more to life than you’re currently experiencing; it’s time to start channeling Truman Burbanks and step outside your boundaries. Maybe you could do something that makes you feel a little awkward…..

• It’s hard to make changes without leaving your comfort zone but a different environment triggers different ideas.
• It’s hard to make changes in isolation and it’s other people who will inspire you and hold you to account.

For me the first half of 2024 was spent mostly staring at a computer screen as I created the course content for Tessellation Nation, and for many of us online is where we work and we can’t simply switch off.  But as I recover and emerge from this prolonged period of intense hyper-focus I’m excited about the real-life events and collaborations I’m doing this year.

These kicked off in mid August with the most fabulous day of Colour and Crochet with Jolanda Rocklin at The Little School of Needlecraft in North Norfolk. I was thrilled when Jolanda invited me to run a workshop in her amazing studio and we were joined by 16 lovely people for a day spent creating colour stories and crocheting colourful ‘join as you go’ motifs. Jolanda provided us with an incredibly beautiful venue and delicious food; the sun also decided to shine for us making it the most idyllic summer day.

Now I’m looking ahead to an Autumn packed with events starting with our next retreat at Breathing Space which is always a weekend of absolute joy filled with crochet, sound baths, meditation, amazing food and time to breathe out and relax in good company. Our September retreat is sold out but we have three more planned for 2025, and an exciting new venue, so hop on the waitlist if you’d like to be the first to know when bookings open.

After the retreat we’ll be heading up to Yarndale in Yorkshire – I LOVE this event!  We’ll have lots of blankets on display and we’re there to answer any questions you may have about our courses. Or just drop by to say hello and have a chat; that’s the thing I enjoy most about Yarndale!

Then I’ll be flying off to Canada for a road trip from Prince Edward Island to Toronto. I’ll be teaching four classes over two days at the PEI Fibre Festival in Charlottetown- this really is a fabulous event and I thoroughly recommend it if you’re in the area. There are lots of different workshops to choose from and the market place will be full of supplies by fabulous independent vendors.

After the festival I’ll be heading to Montreal to teach a ‘join as you go’ crochet class at Espace Tricot which I’m incredibly excited about and then it’s off to the lovely Knit Café in Toronto for a Colour Stories workshop and another crochet class.

Phew!!

I know all of this will be challenging and exhausting. There’ll be times when I’ll feel anxious, uncomfortable and probably overwhelmed after spending so much of this year on my own in my familiar safe spaces staring at a screen. But that’s why I’ve written this blog post – it’s an aide memoire to remind me WHY it’s important to step out of my comfort zones, to ‘push the envelope’ and to change my default setting from ‘remote’ to IRL.

“I hear and I forget. I see and I remember. I do and I understand.” 

– Chinese proverb